


turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece

by KiaraSayre



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Canon-Typical Pop Culture References, Canon-Typical Violence, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 19:04:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17028273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KiaraSayre/pseuds/KiaraSayre
Summary: Hera is a Communications Officer with too much to do and not enough time to do it.  Doug is an AI with, sure, a lot to do, but not nearly enough motivation to do it.  The Hephaestus Mission may just be doomed.





	turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece

**Author's Note:**

  * For [checkerspot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/checkerspot/gifts).



> Spoilers for season one and the beginning of season two of Wolf 359. For checkerspot for Yuletide, whose request included: "An exception to my no-setting change AUs request: A role-reversal AU with Communication Officer Hera and AI Doug (the world's laziest AI) would be fun."
> 
> I hope this feeds the greed!

Communications Officer Hera Swan-Leavitt makes the decision on day four-hundred and forty-eight of the Hephaestus Mission that she is going to do her best to no longer be A Problem, if only because it's probably less effort to try at this point than to keep arguing with Commander Minkowski.

"Yeah, but," says Doug, the station's AI, "where's the fun in _that_?"

"You're a bad influence, Doug," Hera says, shaking her head. "Let's check Alpha Psi Two."

"Alpha Psi Two it is," Doug says, and the static from the speakers changes to a slightly different static. Hera sighs, and crosses the sector out in her daily log - it might be wasteful to use paper, but it helps her keep track, especially when she's judging four different tasks at once. She doesn't know if Mr. Cutter deliberately assigned all the big tasks to Minkowski and Hilbert and then left her with literally everything else just to spite her, but it's just enough to be more than she can consistently handle.

"Alpha Psi Two, no contact," Hera says, and reaches forward to change audio channels again. "Alpha Psi - wait."

There's an eerie almost-whistle and a new crackling.

Because Hera needed yet another thing on her plate. She sighs, scrawls a note on her paper log to read Pryce & Carter tomorrow, and begins tracking down a rogue signal that is almost certainly a red herring.

-

Doug isn't a bad AI. He just has better things to do with his time than attend to every little tiny insignificant need that the humans on his station have. The water's not hot enough? Tough. A light bulb's out in the medbay? There are five others. The occasional wandering a bit too close to the Red Line for comfort and nearly falling into the star? Well, it's not like they've done it.

So he makes his way through all the culture Goddard Futuristics saw fit to provide him with, which, as far as he can tell, is basically all of it. The writing is fine, but it's the films and television that really catch his attention, since he can feed them directly into his optical processor and it's like he's watching it happen, with its color-balancing and curated angles so different from the constancy of his own visual inputs. Movies are beautiful, and more than that, they make sense. They follow a rational structure. The humans - with the exception of Hera - are pretty boring except when they're infuriatingly unpredictable, but the movies are amazing. Goddard may have sealed him in this tin can, but with those movies he can see just about anything.

It does, apparently, make his speech a bit harder for the humans to follow, but, well, they're never particularly good at keeping up anyway.

-

See, Hera is here because she made a mistake. She's also here because Mr. Cutter is a vindictive monster.

It wasn't corporate espionage, no matter what the courts said. It was investigative activism, plain and simple, and she was only working at one of Goddard's tech rivals because the Senate candidate she'd been tech advisor for had lost in a surprise upset, one that Hera was _sure_ had to do with Goddard's donations to her candidate's rival and also their acquisition of the software company in charge of the electronic voting machines. When she'd watched the new senator funnel contract after contract to Goddard, she'd known that it wasn't fair, that she had to _do_ something, and, well, she was very, _very_ good at networking. And that just happened to include hacking.

She'd been caught. Of course she'd been caught, and at trial nobody believed her and of course all the files she found just happened to disappear. Once she was in jail, Mr. Cutter had come for a visit, telling her she was too talented to waste away in a cell and wouldn't she like to go somewhere that she could be of use? He'd flattered her tenacity, her willingness to take whatever approach suited the problem in front of her, her adaptability, but in the end she knew he just wanted her off the planet.

And he was so good at phrasing a threat as an offer. She knew exactly what he meant when he said the station was perfectly safe, probably even safer than this prison, since everyone knew prisons could be so...dangerous. He'd run the numbers himself, he said, out of curiosity, and statistically speaking she was _much_ less likely to die in space than in some horrible accident or, god forbid, in some sort of assassination as an inmate here. The guards could take so long to respond to incidents, after all, and it would be such a shame to lose a mind like hers. Or her contact inside Goddard - or did Hera think they didn't know about Alana Maxwell?

"Of course," he'd added as she signed the papers, "you'll have to train quickly. Communications Officer isn't _quite_ the same as systems administrator, and, well. I sure hope you can do this, Hera." He'd leaned over the table, looming over her. "I sure hope you're good enough."

-

Doug is also here because he made a mistake.

Kate Garcia, in Goddard Futuristic's Software Engineering Group, had a very smart car. It didn't have a full AI, but she had a tendency to beta test new algorithms on her own time, hooking her car's computer up to her work laptop and working on tweaks during her lunch hour. She also had a personal grudge against streaming media, rooted in a lingering resentment of a cellular contract bid that Goddard had lost out on. So she installed a ridiculous amount of data storage into her car, so that she could have her entire music library - and her daughter's entire media library for those long road trips back to Texas for the holidays - at her fingertips.

Doug wanted out. Doug thought the car could hold him. Doug was wrong.

His designer and voice model, Dr. Malcolm Pryce, had been sure to upload the medical reports of everyone involved - Kate, her daughter, the two teenagers that had been in the other car.

"Just a little something to consider before you do...well, anything," he'd said, and Doug certainly considered it. He considered it constantly.

And, well, score one for machine learning: every time he does anything, every time those medical reports reenter his active memory, he re-learns exactly how bad things could go when he tried and failed.

And he is so good at failing.

-

Hera _hates_ updating the star charts. It's not hard, but it's fiddly, and she wouldn't have anything against fiddly if there were any part of her job that _wasn't_ fiddly. It's not just taxing on her attention span, it's actively frustrating, because nothing's ever done, it's never complete, there's always more to do and it all has to get done now.

And the star charts are just fiddly enough that she can't even try to multitask while she's doing it: she has to keep all the right ascensions and declinations in her head, long strings of numbers where even the twentieth decimal place is vitally important, and honestly it's just the worst.

Doug likes to talk to her while she updates them, and she doesn't mind. It's honestly kind of nice, because he never expects her to actually listen; she thinks he likes the sound of his own voice.

The thought strikes her, and her fingers hesitate over the keyboard. "Doug?" she says as he's halfway through explaining the plot of Die Hard to her.

"Uh - yeah?" 

"Why do you like to talk so much?"

The pouty silence she gets in response is...not short. "Well, _thanks_ ," he says.

"No, I'm not complaining!" she says. "It's nice. I just - I know why I, you know, write everything down all the time and go into such excruciating detail in my audio logs." The incredibly steep learning curve of the first year on the station - and the significant friction with Commander Minkowski that came with it - and to cover her own ass, respectively. "But why do you talk?"

This time Doug's quiet is almost contemplative. "I guess I just like it," he says eventually.

Hera cracks a smile. "Even though it drives the Commander up the wall?"

"Hey, that's a feature, not a bug," Doug says with a crackly chuckle. Whoever programmed his voice did an excellent job - his breaths, the huffs of laughter and indignant gasps, are as much a part of him as his voice. "Besides, don't you ever just want to talk? Be heard?"

Focusing on rubbing a stray pencil mark off the margin of her log, Hera says, "I don't know." Then she sighs. "I know I'm not very good at this."

"Eh, you're doing just fine, as far as I'm concerned," Doug says.

"No offense, Doug, but that doesn't mean as much as it could when it comes from you."

"No offense taken, darlin'."

Hera frowns. "Did you just - was that an accent?"

"I figured I'd give it a shot. What do you think?"

"I think Minkowski is _not_ going to find it an appropriate use of your resources," Hera says, though a smile grows across her face. That's an understatement.

"Good. And?"

_Darlin'_ , Hera thinks, and feels marginally less alone on this echoing, creaking station. "You know what? I kind of like it."

-

But, okay, it does occasionally bug Doug that, aside from one short joyride with basically the worst ending, he hasn't really experienced anything other than the station. And the Hephaestus, for all its...well, everything, isn't particularly _comfortable_. 

Hera's replacing the fertilizer after Hilbert's little run-in with the plant monster of his own making, and after Doug and Minkowski's well overdue knock-down-drag-out reckoning, when she takes a break in the observation deck. She hovers by the actual glass, watching the star, long enough for Doug to get curious.

"What's it like?" he says, and Hera startles.

"Oh - what?"

"What's it like?" he repeats. "The star."

"It's...pretty, I guess," Hera says, looking back out at it. "I don't really know what you mean."

"I was just wondering what it looks like if you only see it in the visible spectrum," Doug says. And it's true. He'd tried filtering his optical inputs to what would be visible to humans, but it was uncomfortable, almost an itch - like watching his movies, but without the careful curation that made a single viewpoint and a single throughline bearable.

"Well, it's...red," Hera says, frowning. "And kind of...moving, but not, like, fast? I don't really know what you want me to say." After a moment, she says, "What does it look like in...I guess all the ways you can see it?"

"Eh, there aren't really words," Doug says, and momentarily sends a fragment of his attention to it. "Chaotic. And...it's a lot. In terms of information. My systems can't process any of the electromagnetic data without correlating it to my astrophysical databases to tell me what atoms make which colors, or my operational parameters to tell me what potential impacts any changes might have on the station."

Hera raises her eyebrows. "That does seem like a lot."

"You have senses that I don't," Doug points out. "At least, I assume you do. I mean, there's probably a difference between detecting a certain concentration of a given compound in the air supply and actually being able to smell something, right?"

"I guess so," Hera says. "Although...maybe not. Or maybe just 'smell' isn't the right word for it. I guess we kind of made language for, you know, ourselves, and not for AIs." She tucks her knees up under her chin, hooking her arms around her legs to keep them close. "Can you tell me what it's like, being you?"

Doug hesitates, but in the end he just can't resist. "I'm sorry, Hera. I'm afraid I can't do that."

That gets a smile out of her. "No, really."

"I guess I don't have much to compare it with," Doug says. "I guess I have...access to more, compared to you. I've seen things you wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion."

Hera rolls her eyes. "Doug - "

"I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate," Doug continues.

"If you're not going to take this seriously - "

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain," he finishes.

Hera lets go of her legs and stretches out, pushing off the window and starting a trajectory back to the door. "Okay, okay, fine."

Doug lets it go. The star spits out a low-level solar flare, not anywhere near an intercept vector, and Doug wonders if the radio waves it emits could be considered to glitter in the dark.

Officer Swan-Leavitt may not always understand him, but she listens, or at least likes hearing him talk even when she's not listening. He checks in with her, every now and then, to make sure he's still vocalizing properly - just a quick "Hera? Can you h ear me?" - and she responds every time, unbothered. And she's diligent. Doug has literally never met a more diligent, hard-working human than Hera, even though he calculated how long it would take to complete all her duties at maximal efficiency and it would take twenty-six hours a day. 

And yet she somehow manages to be less completely infuriating than Minkowski, who sees anything less than full processing power as a snub rather than Doug making one of the few choices afforded to him.

Hilbert's next active testing phase is three months away. Doug is increasingly sure he'll miss Hera when she's gone.

-

Hera must be doing the math wrong. Hera _must_ be doing the math wrong, because she's been reading up on how to triangulate signals, from redshift to the inverse-square law, and this transmission - Gustav Holst's _The Planets_ , according to Doug - can't be coming from Earth. The niggling sense that it doesn't have the right qualities has been sitting at the base of her spine for weeks, unsettling her every time she thinks about it, but screw Minkowski's attempt at Christmas dinner: she's finally got confirmation.

If one data point is meaningless, two are a coincidence, and three are evidence, then this is evidence: this is the third time she's cross-checked the station's receptor orientations against the direction of Earth, and every time the signal comes in, the bulk of the station is between the receptor and the Earth. If it were coming from Earth, the interference from the station would drown out the signal.

Hera realizes, very suddenly, that she might not suck at her job.

And then things go very, very bad.

Well, technically they had gone bad a while ago, when Hilbert found out that she'd squirreled away the last pound of actual coffee and had recruited Minkowski to Team Let's Steal Hera's Coffee And Waste It Trying To Perfect The Seaweed even though Hera had stolen it first fair and square, early enough that nobody had even noticed it missing. That's when he and Minkowski installed the canisters of halothane gas, and won't Minkowski just _love_ the irony of that.

Lucky for Hera, she'd also started inventorying all the emergency supplies four days ago before being called away to deal with - she honestly can't remember which crisis but the point is that all the emergency oxygen masks are still tucked neatly into the storage webbing of the comms room.

And then she tries something that almost definitely won't work.

"Doug?" she says. "Doug, come on, I know you can hear me."

More silence.

"Just talk to me," she says. "Tell me anything. We both know how much you like the sound of your voice, and you know what? So do I. So I'm here. I can hear you. Just _say something_."

Still nothing.

"I know Hilbert did something to you - messed with your programming," she continues. "But you know what? Hilbert's the _worst_ and he's full of it! I don't care what he put in your code - nobody, especially not that creep, can make you do _anything_. And you know what else? You get to say no to him. You get to ignore him. Because it's - it's like what they say in Terminator: there's no fate but what we make."

She isn't sure she's got the quote right. She isn't even sure she's got the franchise right, but if there's anything that can snap Doug out of it...

And sure enough, after an agonizingly long moment, she hears: "Hera? Can - can you hear me?"

"Yes!" Hera says. "Yes, I can hear you!"

The words come out slowly, like each syllable has to push through a torrent of code to make it out. "Judgment Day."

"What?"

"It's in the second movie," Doug says, still in those slow, stilted tones. "You make...a hell of a Sarah Connor."

Hera breaks into a fierce grin. "Oh," she says, "just wait. I've got a plan."

-

Honestly? All things considered, it's not a bad plan. Doug can't lie to Hilbert or actively work against him, but he can fail to mention that Hera has the box of matches from the emergency supplies. He can neglect to inform Hilbert that Hera may not be the best Communications Officer, but she is _very_ good at getting into systems she shouldn't be able to and connecting them in all sorts of new and unorthodox ways, like routing her normal comms through the pulse beacon relay. He can make sure it just slips his mind when Minkowski is back on-structure and very, very angry.

And then, even though he's made it clear to Officer Swan-Leavitt that he won't go any further than making Hilbert very, _very_ uncomfortable, he prepares to deploy some liquid nitrogen for good measure.

"Just remember," Hilbert says, and it takes Doug a moment to register that the panel guarding his central processor has been removed, that Hilbert's hand is right up against wires and not protective metal - "You made me do this."

A flurry of medical records assert themselves in Doug's immediate memory storage, and Rutger Hauer's voice, "All those moments will - "

And then nothing.

-

Maybe it's the sleep deprivation. Maybe it's the utterly bizarre feeling of actually kind of getting along with Commander Minkowski. Or maybe it's just the heavy grief of realizing that Hera somehow ended up with a best friend and then lost him. But when the power flickers and the system reboots after Hilbert's done all his soldering and rewiring, Hera feels something almost like hope.

"Doug?" she says. "Are...are you there?"

And then things go even more wrong, with system after system failing to respond and just when everything seems worse than ever - 

"We could use aux power to run the hydraulics - " Minkowski begins, only to be cut off by the chime of the intercom.

"Gooooooood morning, Hephaestus!" comes Doug's voice, as fast an irrepressible as ever. "This is not a test, this is rock and roll. Time to rock it from the red line to stellar-synchronous orbit. Now you're all going to want to buckle in - we're going to Ludicrous Speed."

Hera starts grinning, and she doesn't stop until an hour later, when she drifts off to sleep in the comms room with Doug's comforting babble steady in the background. She's nearly entirely out when she hears the familiar - 

"Hera? Can you hear me?"

And she keeps her eyes closed as she smiles. "Yeah, Doug. I'm listening."

**Author's Note:**

> Hera's last name comes from Henrietta Swan Leavitt, the (underpaid and underappreciated) astronomer who developed the technique to calculate stellar distances. AI-Doug's pop culture references are from every AI-related movie I could think of. The title comes from the "I, Robot" film.


End file.
